Versus / Fall 2011 RTW

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That Christopher Kane’s mental landscape growing up was littered with images of Gianni Versace’s most iconic collections is well known. So his time designing Versus has been fascinating; a chance to see him re-work not only his own memories, but literally reconfigure whatever he is drawn to in the house’s archives. For fall, he started with a coat, then worked into it a black leather boned corset waist, and then caught something of Gianni’s gleaming chain-mail era by dipping the high, block-heeled ankle-strap sandals, and a rectangular box clutch, in shimmering multicolored glitter. (Incidentally, that very nineties phenomenon of the ornate evening shoe for day is looking good again, a welcome relief from all the fetish buckles and straps affixed to platforms of the last few years.) Kane has brought to Versus the same ability to thread an idea through a whole collection that he brings to his own label, shown in London, obsessively morphing and manipulating it from look to look, shifting from the gloss of leather to the sparkle of Lurex sweaters, to wasp-waist dresses with the boning picked out in sparkling stones, to a series of dresses that used a recurring glitter triangle motif, mixing it with an Art Deco–ish pattern that was a collision of triangles and circles. All this focus allows for the key ideas—a sculpted coat, a thick-strapped party dress that plays with sheer and opaque, and, of course, those great sandals—to fully emerge. It seems like the right way to be thinking about Versus: small but perfectly formed. And it’s a testament to Kane that in bringing his own way of doing things, he’s clearly not cowed by the past.